Book. Where is China going? This was the question asked by Yves Chevrier, director of studies emeritus at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in The Earthly Empire. History of Politics in China in the 20th and 21st Centuries II, second part of a series returning to the political history of the country. The question was still open a decade ago, when Xi Jinping took over. And this, despite the four cardinal principles laid down by the leader Deng Xiaoping, from the beginning of his economic reform policy at the end of the 1970s, which set a political line as a sine qua non condition, which has since been incorporated into the Constitution: maintenance of the socialism, of the type dictatorship “people’s democracy”, the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CCP) and Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideas. The political project could not be clearer.
But the country has since experienced a radical transformation, with the advent of the consumer society and the very real loosening of the regime’s social control over the lives of the Chinese since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. of individual freedom was blowing with the possibility of seeing one’s standard of living improve and, for more and more citizens, of choosing their life – which university, which career, which brand of clothing, which car, even, for some. Until a peak of opening that could be located around the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the Shanghai World Expo in 2010.
On the other side of the world, people had begun to harbor hopes, even illusions, much earlier: as early as 1957, the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, set up as a political objective the theory posed by the diplomat George Kennan of a “peaceful evolution” which would allow a political transformation in the communist camp, and in particular the Chinese, through the infiltration of liberal ideas and lifestyles. Not so far from “submit without fighting” already posed by the strategist Sun Tzu six centuries before our era. Suffice to say that the Chinese leaders have not been fooled, retaining generation after generation, from Mao to Xi, via Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, this visceral distrust of what they have all seen as the barely concealed American objective, the end of one-party rule.
Strengthen red ideology
Over the decades, the line to hold that power has steadily shifted. More openness, but towards what? More closure, and to return to what? This is the pendulum of Chinese political life. The ten years that have passed, from Xi Jinping’s accession to the post of General Secretary of the CPC in November 2012, to the 20e congress, which saw him, in the fall of 2022, extended for a third term at least and now surrounded by a central committee of absolutely subservient men, will undoubtedly have been those of the recovery in hand. There is not a section of society that has not been struck down and returned to political rank: the army, the media, campuses, lawyers, business circles…
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